by John Meaney
The lab itself had one current occupant: thin, white-skinned and red-haired, bent over a sheet of paper. Lars Petersen.
"Shalom, Wolf."
"How's it going, Lars?"
"Terrible. I'm trying for third level British English, and I can't get the hang of it. Will you take a look at this?"
Lars showed me the page. The first sentence read: Let's me and you go to the pictures.
"You poor bastard," I told him. "Even Americans need training to cope with this."
"Tell me about it," His native Norwegian has geographical variations, but no distinction between social classes, which makes me think well of Norway. "This is a nightmare."
"All right." I pointed at the sentence. "That's vulgar usage, a bit working-class, and grammatically incorrect."
"It should be You and I, right?"
"Yeah. Now this one..."
The phrase read: A present for you and I.
"... is terrible. It should be for you and me, the dative case... unless your cover ID is of someone badly educated but pretentious. Or well educated but not logical."
We were talking trivia, but inside I was picturing Moshe and that bloody place in the forest. Confiding in Lars was an option, but if we suffered from a compulsion to gossip then what kind of spies would we be?
"Now what's the trick here?" Lars pointed. "He's a fanatic about skiing. Isn't it OK?"
"It's pronunciation. The real British upper classes, the ones who think the year is still nineteen thirty, would emphasize the first syllable: fanatic, not fanatic. And they'd pronounce ski as she, just as you would, you bloody Viking. Oh, and they might say hopefully, but never write it, unless they're describing the way someone smiles."
"It's in my pocket dictionary."
"Generations of public schoolboys" – I remembered Mr Brown and third-form German and the grubby steel ruler descending – "have learned to translate hoffentlich as 'it is to be hoped that'. And I'm not kidding."
Lars was giving me a glum look.
"Plus, there's something else," I told him, "because everything is changing. This is the nineteen bleeding sixties, Daddy-o." I wagged my tape-reel up and down. "You gotta get hip to the scene."
"Oh, piss off, Wolf."
Two hours later, I was back in Schröder's office. Charts littered the desk. A flow diagram lay atop a stack of printed sheets filled with tabulated data that might have been blast yields.
"Sit down." There was a glass of milk by Schröder's hand. The meat sandwich on the small sideboard was wrapped up for later, obeying the dietary laws. "We're into final planning, but I need to establish one thing."
"What's that?"
"That you'll carry a capsule. You'll be carrying too much background material in your head for it to be anything else."
Cyanide. It gets its name from the exotic, shimmering shade of blue that coats the dying person's lips. The thing is, while I wouldn't give my life to save Schröder's career, I know too much about torture to be gung-ho in facing it. The capsule was an escape tool, a final spit in the faces of those who would flense away your humanity. As a captive you are going to die. The question is how, and how quickly.
My thoughts were of Moshe pitching forward in the chair. Of his wife Shana, maybe three months away from giving birth. To Schröder I said: "If you'll do what you can for Moshe Boaz. If you give me your word on it."
We learn, in this place, to use deceit as a weapon, but there's a flip side. If Schröder made a promise on home ground, my estimation was that he would die before breaking it, just as he would expect me to crunch the capsule when the time came.
"All right, Wolf," said Schröder after a moment. "You have my word."
He'd hesitated, thinking it through. Even in this trade, finally, you have to place your trust in somebody.
Would Fern weep at my funeral? Would she break down?
Correction: if they held anything, it would be a memorial service. My body would be a broken, discarded thing buried beneath frozen, chipped soil somewhere behind the Curtain.
"I'll take the mission."
"Thank you, Wolf." Pinchas gave a slow nod. "I do have a question, out of interest."
"Uh-huh."
"Are you English or American, would you say? Originally."
"Which would you like me to be?"
"All right. You're ready for briefing?"
"Yes."
"Let's get to it."
The first twenty minutes were for nit-picking minutiae. While we were fresh, we might spot inconsistencies. Remember how Hitchcock's wife stopped him shipping the original print of Psycho because you could see Janet Leigh breathing? In this trade, continuity errors in a cover story generate a subplot involving stone cellars, bright lights and hard fists. At the end, they don't ask whether you want a blindfold: your eyes are already swollen shut, and the air is cold against your broken teeth when they press the barrel hard against the back of your neck, and stop the movie for good.
"You're still with us, Wolf?"
"Sorry."
I was going to be Thierry Foucault, a consultant mining engineer originally from Marseilles. On behalf of a legitimate French mining corporation (owned by Jewish businessmen) Foucault would be visiting a Polish concern in Katowice, in the southern area known as Silesia.
"The thing is," said Pinchas, "we're pretty certain that Moshe's bomb shut down the Nazi cell in Czechoslovakia."
"And they've infiltrated the Polish site already?"
"We believe they had Plan B already in place."
Basically it was second best: if you wanted to dig uranium out of European soil, you would go for Czechoslovakia first, then Poland. The Soviets have all the decent ore. How's that for cartographic irony?
"And you think the Nazis are Black Path? Or some other group?"
"An affiliated cell. The Black Path connection is pretty well established."
There was no point in asking how they knew. Schröder and Pinchas would hold back information. If the UB or KGB caught me and the capsule thing didn't work out, then I couldn't tell what I didn't know. You might think, since the Soviet Union suffered so much from the Nazi invasion, they'd be warmhearted toward New Jerusalem. But Machiavelli was wrong: my enemy's enemy is my enemy too. And if Black Path could switch locations so quickly, they must have significant Iron Curtain assets in place, better than ours.
Pinchas said: "We need you to retrieve certain mining reports if possible. You've trained on a 1620, right?"
For a moment it sounded like some kind of gun.
"Oh," I said. "The IBM. Right."
We try to keep up to date. Knowing about computers might seem academic, but you'd be surprised. Aiming missiles is just one of their uses; sometimes analysing even census data gives you insight into neo-Nazi or Soviet – or American – intentions.
"They use Fortran apparently," said Pinchas. "Perhaps you'll be able to steal the punched cards or whatever the things use." He shrugged. "That's your field, not mine."
"Er... OK," I told him. "But what good will that do? We already know the Soviets are digging the stuff out of the ground."
Schröder took a breath, expanding his barrel chest. "Our guys in Analysis will try to spot diversions of ore, now they know how it's done. Concentrate on reprocessing, where it's easiest for a third party to sneak stuff out the door."
It made sense. Like diamond mines, security is tightest at the digging face, so no one can take the stuff out in their pockets. But when you're reprocessing used uranium, it's easier to divert a nugget into a secret container, say a vacuum flask that's supposed to contain tea. That's what Moshe's Rachel had done, thinking she was working on behalf of New Jerusalem.
Moshe, pitching forward in his chair...
"That's clever," I said. "Losses get blamed on inefficiency, not theft. But our guys can spot the inconsistencies?"
"They reckon so."
I'd be better off infiltrating the plant as a Soviet scientist, and Schröder already knew that my Russian was
fluent. But if they had the resources to put me in under that kind of cover then that's what they would have done. Or perhaps it was just that we were in a hurry.
"There's a deadline, I take it?"
"Yes," said Schröder. "And there's something else..."
"All right, what is it?"
"This op's a double header."
"Oh. That's interesting."
"Let me show you—"
In outline, after my business meeting in Poland, it would be time to abandon the Foucault identity. Someone else would take my place, travelling back to Paris under that name. This is one of our tested techniques for allowing a long-time mole to finally escape, to leave the East and start a new life in Paris, where he won't have to share a bathroom with a dozen other families, or worry about a neighbour betraying him to the secret police because of some chance, bitter remark about the state of life.
They didn't tell me the mole's identity. I didn't ask.
"Things must be tense at the moment," I said.
The Czech Communist Party was undergoing one of those periodic purges, this time in reaction to tension in the streets. The Polish mood would be affected by the paranoia.
"For phase two of the op, you'll be travelling as a Russian citizen."
"Oh, will I now?"
"The legend is, you'll be returning home to Moscow."
I controlled my breathing. Without any special training, you can breathe on autopilot – including while you sleep – or take conscious command of the process. Breath control is at the heart of Eastern mystic disciplines, based on the biggest neural highway between the logical and intuitive selves. How else to remain calm in the face of confusion?
"Why Moscow? I thought the enemy was Black Path. In Outer Germany."
"Fucking Reinhard," muttered Pinchas.
We're supposed to be professionals, but there was a lot of hatred twisted inside those words. What had Black Path – and Herr Doktor Heinrich Reinhard, leader of their legal political front – done to Pinchas personally?
Then Schröder said: "The Nazis didn't get uranium without Soviet help."
"You mean a mole. A Black Path mole in Moscow."
"Right."
A common anti-Semitism would hardly be enough to unite Black Path and the Red Army, not after the carnage the Nazis visited on Russia. But every intelligence service and terrorist movement tries to infiltrate every other. If Black Path had help inside the Soviet military or even the KGB, they'd have one hell of an advantage. To my knowledge, we in Branch 7 had never managed to place a deep mole in Soviet intelligence.
"And," murmured Pinchas, "see how they switched from Přībram to Kowary Podgórze so fast." He meant from the Czech mine to its Polish counterpart. "Just as soon as Moshe Boaz blew the Přībram cell."
"Poor choice of words," I said.
Neither Pinchas nor Schröder reacted to that.
"So what am I getting up to in Moscow? It's bloody cold this time of year."
"You're meeting someone you'll need to be careful with," said Pinchas. "Someone I've spent time developing."
"Someone with information about Black Path, I hope."
"Me, too." Pinchas took off his glasses and looked at me without blinking, which made me think again that the lenses were zero-prescription fakes. "Our contact's being cagey, no pun intended, and we don't know exactly what he's got to hand over. Only that there's something, and it's relevant."
"I'm being slow," I told him. "What pun?"
Schröder sucked in a breath as he if he were about to boost a loaded barbell upwards.
"Being cagey, KGB. Your contact" – his voice was heavy – "is Colonel Arkady Ignatieff of the Komitet Gosudarstvenoi Bezopasnosti."
"A KGB colonel?"
"The deepest mole we have, whose importance goes beyond his rank. He serves on their Strategy Committee."
"Oh." Then: "Fuck me."
"Let's hope he doesn't try to," muttered Pinchas.
I didn't know if he was referring to Colonel Ignatieff's proclivities or being metaphorical, but it hardly mattered. We did have a deep KGB asset, yet I'd never known about it. This was reassuring, since keeping secrets is what we do best.
But still...
No wonder they expected me to carry cyanide.
When the briefing was over – and we'd discussed my travel plans, flying into the East from Paris instead of New Jerusalem, which was standard procedure – Schröder asked for any off-topic questions. This is when we're supposed to come up with the 'irrelevant' comments that are such a clear guide to our state of mind. I asked this: "Are you really sure about the A-bomb?"
"What do you mean?" It was Pinchas who answered.
"German neo-Nazis want their old country back, their Heimat. Surely they need it habitable, not glowing in the dark."
Pinchas said: "Don't overestimate the Nazi capacity for rational thought."
But Schröder shook his head.
"The target's unlikely to be on home soil."
"Then where?"
For a moment, Pinchas and Schröder looked at each other. Then Pinchas's earlier question returned to mind: Are you English or American, would you say? A second later, Schröder confirmed my intuition.
"New York was always Hitler's first target for an atomic bomb, just as soon as the V-4 rocket plane was ready."
Shit. New York.
"Black Path would have wet dreams," said Pinchas, "making one of the Führer's dreams come true."
It wasn't just Uncle Isaak, living in Brooklyn. It was a million walking, working, sleeping, burping, laughing, living beings, likely to be turned into charcoal smears in a fraction of a second, now that we had the scientific means to bring a star's hellfire to Earth. Call it a measure of humanity's progress.
New York.
"We have to stop them, Wolf."
"That's fucking obvious, isn't it?"
Sooner or later, everyone betrays their nerves.
FIVE:
PARIS, December 1962
Two people were trailing Fern, a long way back along the embankment. To my right, the River Seine was flat and grey. A few sparse snowflakes drifted down. It was like a perfect movie as Fern approached, elegant in her calf-length coat. She had a teal-green scarf tied at her throat. The scarf was silk, very French, forming a change in image for her. Or maybe I was looking too closely.
For most agents headed East, Paris was just a way-station, a jumping-off point. But for me, it was the place where the world's most perfect woman lived.
"Hello, darling." Her voice was crystalline, so beautiful.
"Fern."
We stood facing each other. Several flakes of snow drifted between us. The air was cold, heady, rich in oxygen; or perhaps it was Fern that brought purity to the world.
"Those clumsy youngsters," I added, "are your bodyguard, right?"
"Neos." With a mock sad shrug: "Are they so obvious? It's their third month of training."
"I don't..."
Then I wrapped my arms around her, swallowing as we hugged, trying to keep my eyes open and not look desperate, because of the watchers. As far as they were concerned, as far as they could ever know, Fern and I were old friends who'd not seen each other for too long. If it wasn't for the hunger that sang and howled inside me, that would be the truth.
Her skin was cold against mine, and the touch of her cheek, my God, burned like electricity, like fire.
"I can't do this," I said.
Fern's lips brushed mine. For all I know, the sparks were visible.
"Of course you can."
She could tell me to piss off forever and I would. It might be the simplest option. But without that dismissal, I could never walk away from her, not even when she got engaged to Jean-Paul, not even when they married, because of what she said in Leningrad that night.
"You're the world to me. Whatever else we... You're all I really want. Ever."
Now I said: "Can we spend time together?"
Over the Seine, a solitary, bent-win
ged gull floated, stationary against the wind.
"Aren't we together right now?"
So that was my answer. If I could have loved her less, for the sake of my own well-being, I would have.
"But you're going well? Tu vas bien?"
"J'ai la pêche, moi. I'm just peachy." Her olive skin was unblemished, and her dark eyes sparkled. "Isn't that what Americans say?"
"I guess."
The two neophyte watchers would report to a handler, their training officer, who might well be Jean-Paul himself. Quite often a Station chief will keep his hand in by helping with the neos' education. He'd done a pretty good job of teaching me.
"Your husband" – I forced the words out – "saved my life as well as yours. Gratitude is one thing, marriage is a—"
"I don't think you're his type."
"Yes, but I mean... Oh, fuck." I blew out a breath that steamed in the chill air. "I give up. Can we get some coffee before I die of pneumonia?"
"You and your coffee." Fern linked her arm through mine. "Someday your heart will explode."
We began to walk through the snow, heading for the snow-decorated stalls where vendors sold books and prints even in the winter cold, because this was the Left Bank and it had an image to maintain. Opposite was a café I'd visited before.
"It already did," I murmured.
I meant my heart, and how it exploded; and Fern knew that. She squeezed my arm as we walked.
We sat near the window, looking out from the warm café. One of the neos was across the street. The other sat inside beneath a reproduction Lautrec poster, reading a menu. I tapped the menu on the table between me and Fern.
"Are the pancakes good here?" I asked. "Or are they crêpes?"
